An impatient world

The New York Times gives us this morsel today, from writ­ers Matt Richtel and Ashlee Vance:

There is noth­ing new about frus­tra­tion with start-up times, which can be many min­utes. But the agi­ta­tion seems more intense than in the pre-Internet days. Back then, peo­ple felt less urgency to log on to their soli­tary, uncon­nected machines. Now the des­ti­na­tion is the vast world of the Web, and the com­puter indus­try says the fast-boot sys­tems cater to an information-addicted soci­ety that is agi­tated by even a moment of downtime.

The arti­cle equates the PC-makers’ rush to get boot times down with automak­ers’ attempts to nar­row the time gap between 0 and 60 miles per hour.

I’m almost embar­rassed by this label­ing of our cul­ture as speed obsessed, so impa­tient that even a few min­utes (or sec­onds) of wait­ing for a com­puter to boot is an eter­nity of wasted time. I’m embar­rassed, but I know it’s an accu­rate label. I have waited those end­less sec­onds while my com­puter does some­thing that is tak­ing, no doubt, a rea­son­able amount of time. In those moments, I really feel like my com­puter has it out for me, that it wants to kill me with frustration.

But I’ve learned to use those times when noth­ing else is hap­pen­ing. I con­sciously switch my mind into “think­ing” mode, instead of “com­puter” mode (where my mind resides far too often). I’ve learned that the moments in between activ­i­ties can be very use­ful, and inter­est­ing insights are often found in those “lim­i­nal” spaces — to use a term from my under­grad days.

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